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The Growth Of Responsive Web Designs

(by Kevin O'Brien 1/1/2015)

A recent poll by Google shows over 80% of their followers on Google plus have said they
are using responsive web design (RWD).
But is this really indicative of the internet as a whole?

If this seems a high number to you then you are not the only one. Many SEO and
online marketeers
are
suggesting this is overly optimistic.
It now seems their scepticism could be right. A recent independent developer
ran some very revealing tests by
crawling the top 10,000 sites in Alexa to check if they were responsive. Have a look at that post
in the link above for more details on the method he used.
He wrote code to
look for
media tags which indicated if the sites were using RWD.

The result of these very statistically reliable tests showed that only 11% of the
top 100 sites were responsive. The top 10,000 sites showed that the adoption was up to 18.7%. So we have an
increase in adoption when we include smaller companies.
Other researchers have done tests using fortune 100 and S&P 500 companies with similar results.

These figures seem to suggest that the move to responsive designs is slower for the top
100 companies compared to the top 1000.
With the top 1000 slower than top 10,000, which is very likely due to the top companies
having more stake holders and
and more complex websites to have to re-redesign.

Because we have many more independent researchers showing roughly 18% take up for RWD, this
shows that
Google's figure of 80% is not to be relied on in this particular case.

But although Google's numbers are probably wrong, the 18% by other researchers still
represents a significant growth. If we consider that responsive
web design is only about five years old. This technology only became relevant in 2010 when
enough people
began to use the browsers that supported the new CSS3 and HTML5 technologies.

The numbers of responsive sites is now growing quickly. They are now catching up with
separate URLs as the dominant mobile site configuration method. Sites with separate URLs
for mobile and desktop ("Mdot")
were found 21% of the time in the study above, and responsive web design ("RWD")
was right behind that with 17% of the total.

Its now 2015 in which Google has reported that they are now sending more traffic to mobiles
than to desktops. So if you want to know
how to build responsive designs now is the time to do so. Get your site changed and you'll be
part of the growth that is 18% with a website far more easily found through mobile devices.

Also Google announced this April 2015 that they now reward sites in search results who use RWD

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22 May 2015

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